In honour of an outstanding human being, a dear friend, and our very talented book design team, I give you the bike stories of James Wilson of Overdrive Design.

Wouldn’t you know, it is by far the hottest day of the summer, with a humidex of 48C. I’m heading west to Overdrive Design, near the DuPont and Dundas West intersection. I climb into the car irritated because the intense heat has made it impossible for me to enjoy the challenge of cycling to new parts of town, on small backwater streets.

The office is an open-concept loft, where people work quietly at their desks. The atmosphere is charged with positive energy. James Wilson, the owner, works at the desk nearest the door. His work station is walled in by counters, against which are parked four spectacular bikes. These are the staff transportation equipment. The ratio is not exactly one-to-one, but it is actually James who didn’t ride today. We begin our introductions by accusing the stifling weather, both of us relieved that the other was equally culpable, equally victimized.

James’ story is a hair-raising, spine-tingling, gut-wrenching adventure. He’s a hard-core cyclist. Here’s a teaser: James designed the Rocky Mountain logo, the triple peaks in the red circle. OMG!

James lives in Oakville. He leaves the house at 5 a.m. so that his commute is timed for mostly green lights. His preferred route is Lakeshore Boulevard, so he drops in at Kerr Street and Cornwall Road, and drops out at the Humber River Bridge. The trip is forty kilometres, door to door. That’s one way, in case you’re wondering. Yeah, OMG. James assures me this is a lifestyle choice, that he prefers to do the eighty kilometres round trip ten months of the year. James wants to see a shift in thinking about bikes, to how they accommodate our health, the environment, our commute, to how they bring an element of fun to our lives.

In the mid-’80s, he worked at City Hall, writing safe cycling handbooks.

“I‘ve seen the complete and utter disregard that cyclists demonstrate for the rules of the road,” he says grimacing, knowing that the odds are stacked against you.

“On my rides in, I try to avoid death,” he declares. Like me, James makes eye contact with drivers, cyclists and pedestrians and he uses hand signals. Unlike me, he never plugs into an iPod. He is one of those advocates who leads by example.

“All the bikes leaning against your counter are cardable beauties,” I say genuinely. He grins. All of them are his, with the exception of a cool Gary Fischer commuter bike. This last belongs to Sylvia Nan Cheng, the cyclist who invited me here today.

“I lend bikes to all my staff so they can ride half-decent machines.” He runs the office with as much environmental observance as possible. The air conditioning goes off at the end of the day. Overhead lights are off, but each person has a desk lamp. There are recycling containers in plain view. Leaning against the wall is a hand-built rack, with pulleys. James typically uses it to hang bikes from his office ceiling, out of the way. The ceilings in this office are too low to install the rack, which explains all the bikes along the counter.

“Well still, there’s something charming about walking into an office where bike souls greet you, before people do,” I assure him.

The cycling mentality feeds into the office environmentalism. He doesn’t want to be despotic about it, but he hopes it rubs off. One of his new employees actually quit smoking to fit in. James lives his life in the firm belief that the fifty-five-year-old employer should be in better shape than his employees if he expects them to maintain high standards.

James’s bikes are equally astounding. For touring, James uses an ’84 Pinarello Montello SLX. The leather is hand-stitched. He owns a Fondriest, the spectacular red and white Italian carbon fibre bike reclining a mere five feet away, on loan.

Today, James had planned to ride his 1987 LandShark Pro steel frame tandem. Yes, he had intended to ride his tandem, unaccompanied, forty kilometres, into the office. And then home again. The frame is hand-built and fillet-brazed. He assures me that the bike is very light and it handles extremely well, so you hardly notice the second half behind you.

He muses on the days courting his wife, when he’d ride the tandem on the Bayview Extension to her office at Yonge and Eglinton to pick her up. I’ve done the Extension on my mountain bike. There are no polite adjectives available to adequately describe the Extension. The effort of riding a tandem up that hill to pick up a girlfriend sounds incredibly romantic.

James cycles a lot. By the law of averages, James (like most cyclists) expects to have accidents. He has been hit six times by cars, all on left-hand turns where the driver illegally cut James off. He typically “Supermans over the hood,” sometimes with the bike and sometimes not. James has been doored once, and yes, it hurt. I have heard this story several times now and I’m beginning to see a pattern. There appears to be a direct relation between the size of the vehicle being driven and the visibility of smaller transportation options sharing the road. Drivers don’t mean to cut off or hit cyclists: they just don’t see them.

James tells me he has crashed in lots of races, and then he stops talking for a moment. When I look up he declares, “You might as well hold a gun to your head if you’re not going to wear a helmet.”

His worst accidents are things he has done to himself.

Awhile back, James and his brother were training down by the zoo, in Scarborough. The pavement was wet. They was travelling downhill at about twenty-five kilometres/hour (so, not fast) when they hit a bridge deck. Bridge decks are notoriously unreliable surfaces. Unfortunately, there were no signs posted to alert oncoming traffic of the deck’s presence, so the cyclists didn’t slow their rate of descent. The bridge deck was covered with a microfilm of water, which responds to a tire the same way sheer ice responds. James slid out. His front wheel ripped off, the stem snapped and the forks catapulted him straight into the deck. He laid on the road, stunned.

His brother was temporarily paralyzed, but when he could move, he noticed James was spurting blood. James’s face needed a hundred stitches, and two rounds of reconstructive surgery. Yes, he’s still ruggedly handsome. (Don’t tell his wife I said so. I want her to continue to ride that tandem with him.)

James got back on his bike two weeks later. Signs were posted at the bridge deck as a direct result of James’s accident and the lawsuit, that he won.

In 2004, James was training north of Oakville. He was coming out of a fast decline (about forty-five kilometres/hour), standing in the saddle.

“Suddenly, I was in the middle of a catastrophic equipment failure.” The crank arm snapped off the bottom bracket and he slammed into the top tube.

In the accident, James chipped his pelvis, broke a rib, and gashed his head. At his computer, he finds an image of his core, taken after the accident. The bruising sustained was gruesome. He feels fortunate to not have severed anything. O-M-G, that would hurt.

Three weeks later, the bruising was healed enough that he could ride again.

In 2009, he was enjoying the Rideau Lakes Cycle Tour, an annual ride between Ottawa and Kingston hosted by the Ottawa Bicycle Club. In Perth, the Ladies Rotary feed the cyclists, and knowing this James sprinted to the tents, distracted by the feast ahead. He cracked a nothing joke with a friend and suddenly sailed into a five foot ditch. His fall was stopped by the wall of dirt on the opposite bank. The result was four broken ribs and a body unwilling to pedal another foot. He was out of the saddle for a couple of weeks. The takeaway to this particular story is that you should always buy Campanolo wheels.

“They’re bombproof,” James assures me (and apparently, so is he). After the accident, his wheels didn’t even need to be trued. When he realized this, he bought Campanolo wheels for the tandem.

James is an intelligent, kind and compassionate man. His work speaks for itself. On a bike, James does not ride foolishly, nor does he make irrational decisions.

“I stay alert so I don’t do something stupid on the road,” he says. “Every time I ride into work, I consider my mortality and manage the ride to reduce the risks.”

Despite everything that has happened to him, James still believes cycling is a smart and viable way to travel. And having met him, I can honestly say that if James has OMG stories, it’s because his life is lived in an equally OMG manner where the things that should matter, do.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.

Marty Kohn—the man I’ve come to interview on the tenuous credibility that he is married to Dufflet Rosenberg (of Dufflet Pastries, famous for its entirely natural and lovingly hand-crafted pastries and desserts)—quotes my favourite author’s view on cycling. Marty is eagerly leaning toward me from across his kitchen table. He first heard this comment as a child and it has shaped how he sees things. “I never got over it,” he tells me. “I still want to get to know a place from a bicycle seat.”

At an early age, Marty learned independence on a bike. He explored the entire city on the simple instruction, ‘Be home for dinner.’ He later toured Europe for five months on a bike. “It really changed me,” Marty explains. “There is this wonderful intimacy of touching every inch of this trip. You understand the scale.”

Today, Marty is the Kohn in Kohn Shnier Architects, where his mandate is to encourage others to ride. Everyone does the Ride for Heart together, and they “see stressed clients doing it, grinning like a kid.” If someone rides into work on a junker, Marty takes the bike home. The drop bars are replaced with flat bars, wheel size is reduced, and cantilever brakes are added. These small changes turn the ride from a chore to a pleasure, which affects the rider deeply.

“When I see a bike, I see a person on it,” Marty explains. “People fetishize all kinds of things and I’m not immune to that, but there’s no such thing as a bad bicycle. You can make pretty much any bike a nice thing to ride.”

“How do you know to do all this?” I ask with some surprise, wondering how I continue to unearth fabulous stories. He explains that he worked for a time at Bicyclesport.

“Mike Barry is at the centre of sensibility,” Marty declares energetically. “There’s something noble, and wonderful and well-mannered about him … I owe him a lot because cycling is connected with the best things in my life.”

Marty’s architectural firm is currently designing a kindergarten-only facility in Thorncliffe Park, the first of its kind. Enrollment is anticipated to reach eight hundred.

“There’s so much pedestrian space in Thorncliffe Park but circumstances discourage riding,” he tells me. “If more people rode bicycles, the world would be a better place.”

Marty dreams of gathering a herd of bicycles for the school—thirty balance bikes (which allow children to learn without pedals and training wheels) and thirty regular bikes. I’m in awe at this man who prefers to discuss children cycling over the facility he is designing.

He takes me on a tour of his basement. Marty and Dufflet own a lot of quality bicycles. Not a few of these bikes feature the decal Dufflet Pastries. There are several Moultons. Against one wall leans their Mariposa tandem. Marty and Dufflet have done twenty overseas trips on this tandem, most of them in western Europe.

When you travel by bike, people generally see your vulnerability and your commitment, and this translates into an interest and an appreciation, a connectedness. You can also create stories on a bike.

Marty and Dufflet sometimes ride through smaller European towns where they like to interact with people in passing. They once met a woman carrying her young son, who had polio. Dufflet gave her seat to the boy, who laughed as he and Marty rode.

One day, Marty and Dufflet were riding on a steep descent through a forested locale when, in the clearing, they came upon a wedding party. The groom and the best man were heads down under the hood of the car, and the bride stood arms akimbo beside them. As the tandem came into view, the party stopped and pointed at the enchanting sight of a couple on a bicycle.

Playfully, Marty gestured to the couple, “Do you want to borrow our bike?” Everyone laughed, and a photo session with the tandem ensued. He says when you go touring on a bike, it is good to just let the day unfold.

Charmingly, Marty describes women on a bike as very beautiful in their self-sufficiency; he admires their willingness to accept challenges and the sense of independence they exude. Marty used to ride to Dufflet’s business for a quick visit, and sometimes would accidentally spot her on the street, cycling.

“I would see her on her bike and I would fall in love with her all over again.” he says dreamily.

Marty is enamoured with his wife’s Tour de Dufflet events, where cyclists travel between Dufflet locations and enjoy something sweet at each. It provides opportunities for taking children on a fun outing, and to see unexplored parts of the city. Besides, this is a guilty pleasure that you can cycle off. And as an architect, Marty fantasizes about people using bicycles to engage with the city.

“Why restrict the Ride for Heart to the Don Valley?” he wonders. If organizers created a loop that included the 401 and the 427, if businesses hosted parts of the ride, if the event involved more of the city, the impact would be enormous. “There would be no highway exhaust for one morning.” Suddenly, Marty is nearly leaping off his seat with these imaginings. “Think of the blackout! There were lots of wonderful things that happened as a result.” He thinks a twenty-four hour period of deprivation brings out good things in people, and then points to the event a Day Without Cars in Palermo, Italy. He envisions an off-road circuit, riding along the Humber, across the hydro right-of-way and down the Don, exploring the ravines.

Like me, Marty is outraged that we have overcomplicated cycling in Toronto. “Why can’t my grandmother ride here?” he says heatedly. “It’s much riskier than it needs to be.”

The door is unlocked at this moment, and Dufflet appears in the kitchen. As if on cue, two cats leap onto some furniture, to stand near her elbow. Dufflet leans into Smokey, who sniffs her face. She scratches the cat’s ear. Laszlo, a black and white cat, waits his turn.

Marty explains to Dufflet what we are doing, asking if she has any stories she would like to share. She protests gently that he has likely already told all her stories. The cats have her attention entirely.

He smiles at me. “The evolutionary advantage that cats have is that they can trade food and shelter for frugal displays of affection.” I am entirely in agreement, and decide to leave the four of them in peace. Rising, I begin to collect my things.

We continue to discuss the city’s mindset as I head toward the door. Given Toronto’s incredible cycling history that includes such names as Mike Barry, Martin Heath and Jet Fuel, Marty thinks it should be a better place to ride. He tells me that in Holland, cyclists and pedestrians coexist because they know how to behave. He says there’s a very clear code of manners there: you pass on the left, and when doing so you click your brake lever to alert them of your presence. If someone has passed you, you remain behind them.

“We can be a boorish society,” I agree.

At the door, Dufflet offers me homemade date squares. These are kind and gracious people.

Half an hour later, I’m driving north of the city, tired and distracted. The highway is dimly lit and there are no protective barriers for wildlife. Suddenly, a deer stumbles onto the highway between me and the truck ahead. My headlights flash across his flank as I veer to miss him, allowing him to scramble to safety.

Pulling over to recover myself, I realize this is one of those paradigm moments. There is no evolutionary advantage to be gained as a commuter in Toronto: regardless of our chosen mode of transport, we are all sentient beings trying our best to get along sensibly in life. Whether you cycle or walk or drive, we must all slow down and watch out for each other, because you never know what creature you might be trading kindnesses with, around the next bend.